Opera
stephen.walsh
A drama of passion for essentially passive characters, Debussy’s one and only completed opera is a masterpiece of paradox. How do you stage a work whose dramatis personae hardly seem aware of their own destructive feelings, and who inhabit their island world like the blind who, according to Pelléas, used to visit the curative fountain but stopped doing so when the king himself went blind?Michael Boyd, in his beautiful but occasionally frustrating production for Garsington Opera, approaches - if he doesn’t wholly solve – this problem by treating each of the 15 scenes as a kind of static Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Der Rosenkavalier, you might think, is one of those operas that belong in a specific place and time and no other. “In Vienna,” says Strauss's score, “in the first years of Maria Theresia’s reign” (i.e. the 1740s). But this, of course, is a provocation. For the Welsh National Opera, Olivia Fuchs updates it to, roughly, the date of composition (1910-11), or perhaps even a few years later, to judge from the flickering gunfire, and the heavy emphasis on militarism in the programme. And she supplies the Marschallin with a Doppelgänger in the person of an old lady dressed 1930s/40s, who haunts the Read more ...
David Nice
Nature’s germens tumble all together rather readily in more recent operatic Shakespeare. Following the overblown storm before the storm of Reimann’s Lear and the premature angst of Ryan Wigglesworth’s The Winter’s Tale, what's rotten in the state of Denmark rushes to the surface a little too quickly in Brett Dean's bold new take on the most challenging of all the tragedies. This is an impressive labour of love from all concerned at a level which only Glyndebourne at its best can manage, led with supreme authority by conductor Vladimir Jurowski and director Neil Armfield. Yet the score worries Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s all there in the first few bars of Britten’s music – that unsettling tension between beauty and familiarity, and eerie, undefinable otherness. Those cello glissandi might end in glowing major chords, but the tentacle-like slides throw them into doubt. We’re no longer in a binary world of major or minor, but a harmonic landscape of infinite possibility. Netia Jones’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream delights visually in shades of grey, a gorgeous shadow-play of a production, but when she drained her designs of colour she also stripped it from the drama, leaving Britten’s opera a wan reflection Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The Longborough Festival was started, essentially, to perform Wagner, and Wagner is still what it does best. This revival of Carmen Jakobi’s production of Tristan und Isolde is the strongest argument imaginable for small-theatre Wagner. For once the voices can make themselves heard without bellowing; the orchestra is clear and detailed, not just a distant fog; and – a rare treat in opera of any kind – acting with the face as well as the arms and torso becomes a factor in establishing character and relationships.Isolde is a passionate young girl with a manipulative streak. But what Wagnerian Read more ...
Iestyn Davies
Tomorrow Britten’s opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream will begin a short run at the Snape Maltings, Suffolk in a new production directed by Netia Jones and conducted by Ryan Wigglesworth. It will mark the high point of the Aldeburgh Festival’s summer celebrations half a century on from the opening of the Snape Maltings concert hall. It is therefore more than a happy coincidence that back in 1967 the "Dream" was aired as part of the hall’s maiden season.I shall be performing the countertenor role of Oberon. Alongside me will be soprano Sophie Bevan as Tytania, bass Matthew Rose as Bottom, a Read more ...
theartsdesk
The first of Jiří Bělohlávek’s final three appearances in London, conducting his Czech Philharmonic in a concert performance of Janáček’s Jenůfa, came as a shock. The trademark grey curly hair had vanished. Clearly he had undergone chemotherapy, but we all presumed – since no-one pries in these instances – that what had to be cancer was in remission. By the time of his Dvořák Requiem at the Barbican in April, the assumption was that he would carry on for an indefinite period of time. So his death at the untimely age of 71 last Wednesday came as a surprise even to those who knew him better Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
''…after various Accidents, it comes to pass that he recovers both Her and his Kingdom”. Handel's Radamisto may be a tale of warring kingdoms, noble self-sacrifice and mature, wedded love, but it’s also a fairly daft piece of dramatic belief-suspension, whose various knotty conflicts get miraculously untangled in a brisk few bars of recitative, just in time for a rousing final chorus and whatever the ancient Armenian version is of a nice cup of tea.Director John Ramster is well aware of this, embracing the opera’s idiocies along with its musical glories in his witty new production for Read more ...
David Nice
"Love is in the air," croons or rather bellows presenter Juri Tetzlaff, getting his audience of adults and children to bellow back the wordless refrain, arms swaying above their heads. Mezzo Sophie Rennert, dragged up as noble Lotario, and soprano Marie Lys as widowed princess Adelaide dance tenderly to the strains. They're not singing one of the most ravishing love duets in opera this morning because this is the one-hour family version of Handel's Lotario. And a better advertisement to the parents for the whole thing I can't imagine. The show proper is the best I've seen out of four of Read more ...
David Nice
When are the big international opera houses going to wake up to the great British talent that is Elizabeth Llewellyn? With her opulent soprano – shaded middle register, full bloom at the top, cutting chest voice – she was born to sing Verdi and Puccini, and her stage presence is undeniable from the moment she steps out. English National Opera threw her a few roles – Micaëla, Mimì, Mozart's Countess – but then seemed to pass over her in favour of American sopranos. Now Opera Holland Park has showcased her brilliance in an opera made for a London summer night – Puccini' Read more ...
stephen.walsh
This last of Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s semi-staged Monteverdi series took us back practically to the very start of the whole genre. L’Orfeo was presented in Mantua in 1607 as a court opera, and will have been seen and heard by a fraction of the number of people who crowded into Bristol’s Colston Hall on Sunday night. Between then and the Ulysses of 1641 the first public theatre opened in Venice, and the whole nature of opera was transformed.Anyone who has come across the madrigal group I Fagiolini’s Full Monteverdi performances will have an idea of how L’Orfeo emerged from the madrigals of Read more ...
David Nice
There are certain roles where you’re lucky to catch one perfect incarnation in a lifetime. I thought I'd never see a soprano as Natasha in Prokofiev's War and Peace equal to Yelena Prokina, Valery Gergiev’s choice for Graham Vick’s 1991 production. When Vick directed a radically different take, also at the Mariinsky, in 2014, the Natasha was 25-year-old Aida Garifullina, born in Kazan so like Nureyev and Chaliapin a Russian of Tatar origins. Not only was she as beautiful and as youthful in spirit as the interim incumbent, Anna Netrebko, but like Prokina she seemed to live the intense emotions Read more ...